[forrest2]

There is flywheel issue with generative search: content producers, information curators or outlets, etc need to get paid.

People are okay-ish with Google in part because it drives traffic and traffic can be profitable. Fancy features that snatch website content and show them in Google's result pages are already not appreciated by indexed websites.

If generative search becomes the dominant interface, we will eventually see severe public info stagnation until alternative business models can grow around it or avoid it altogether. I suspect we'll see more platforms like Spotify for X and a continued shift toward subscription platforms and youtube.

Of course, what's to stop the bots from watching all of Netflix, listening to every podcast, etc? It will be an interesting decade for law / regulation / licensing.

[im3w1l]

If people consume content through AI assistant then it stands to reason that the content will be adapted for this mode of consumption. Content will be designed to have a certain effect on the AI assistant. Answer Engine Optimization. Articles full of likely prompt followed by desired answer.

[EGreg]

Why just public info stagnation? It will be dwarfed by believable content generated by swarms of internet bots.

Once a stable diffusion like open source GPT-3 appears, it will be used to create fake news all the time. Like imagine 70 different outlets all with relatively large clout on social networks suddenly announce that Elon Musk is running for president. Nevermind that he wasn’t born in the USA… somehow mysteriously none of them address it:

Yes it is here and it’s already being spread but that is just a tiny sliver of what will happen in the next 5 years: https://youtu.be/LSlv4AsChwg

Such stuff can be used to move markets, pump and dump assets and even start new wars!

[forrest2]

One could argue that what you're describing is one of those alternative business models. You don't care if someone comes to your page anymore for ads if the scraped page is the ad.

I'm sad about what I think the stable equilibrium looks like for internet vs AI, and I hope there are some platforms that are able to put in the good fight to keep the internet awesome.

The internet is such an amazing public good and has moved technology forward at such an insane pace. It'd be depressing to explain to my grandkids that you used to be able to learn anything on the internet without subscribing to the X platform or Y curated channel.

[brookst]

What’s different about AI? People are cheap. Anyone who wants to do this can already do it just with mechanical Turk or just hiring writers in low income countries.

[doliveira]

AI is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster, not to mention amoral.

[brookst]

Disinformation is moral when created by people, because it costs more?

I’m new to this idea that something can be acceptable when done by people but unacceptable when automated. I don’t really see it.

[doliveira]

Amoral, not immoral. I mean the AI won't make any moral judgement itself, and using it for whatever task doesn't carry additional moral implications other than those of the task itself, opposite to humans in which you have to care at least a little bit about what you're telling them to do.

About the task itself, it may be immoral by nature, and now it can be executed orders of magnitude faster and without the moral concerns concerting the workers themselves.

[notwokeno]

People are going to continue to write books and documentation because AI don't replace those (new software won't be explained by AI so it needs documentation and AI hallucinates anyway so you still have to check it. Books are similar but more extreme.)

People will also continue to chat with each other in eg IRC because human connection is pleasant on a metaphysical level (AI cannot replace this) so you'll always have that as a data source.

[ClumsyPilot]

People will not write books and blogs if they can't pay the bills. If AI xant replace those, you will have no books and blogs. Thats how market works.

> People will also continue to chat with each other... so you'll always have that as a data source.

Your solution takes us back to before invention of the printing oress? the dark ages?

[stocknoob]

People won’t just write encyclopedia articles for free, right?

[anticensor]

Many Wikipedians write for free, indeed.

[notwokeno]

Most good blogs are part of something else and don't exist for their own sake. If your theory about books were true than the web would have killed them. It turns out having a carefully reviewed hard copy of the information is valuable so people still buy them. I highly doubt AI will change that.